Thursday, November 10, 2016

Five secret shared universes in literature

Whitney Collins is the author of The Hamster Won't Die: A Treasury of Feral Humor, creator of the website The Zen of Gen X. At B&N Reads she tagged five top shared universes--"the idea of re-using characters from one story in another, or creating a fictional universe in which to set different stories"--in literature, including:

Every Single Stephen King Novel

It’s no secret that Stephen King has been slowly weaving every single novel he’s ever written into a comprehensive multiverse, but the slow pace of his undertaking has kept it hidden from some readers. An argument can be made that King kicked off his efforts in earnest with 1994’s Insomnia, which makes the multiverse explicit and introduces the idea that all the stories King has told are repetitions of a struggle between good and evil that ripples throughout time and space. What makes King’s multiverse exceptional is that he clearly wrote most of his early works without the concept in place, making his ability to weave them into a cohesive whole impressive indeed.